I've been to two medical facilities and a large regional hospital in the last week where there were open wifi networks with no portals. My apartment building operates an open wifi network for guests so we don't have to bother giving out passwords to visitors. An airport I visited last month has wide open wifi. A see ads on transit buses all the time stating that the bus has wifi. I suspect that is wide open because the transit agency didn't want to deal with tech support.
It's pretty common for public networks to still have a captive portal to get the user to view an ad or click "I agree" before actually granting full connectivity.
Fully open wifi that didn't require posting to an http or https endpoint was never common in the first place.
Consumer routers are now shipped pre-configured with a password on the network so random joe who bought his router at best buy or got it from his ISP doesn't accidentally provide free wifi to his 20 closest neighbors.
Meanwhile out of the box every single xfinity provided modem/router combo provides by default an open network with no password that allows any other xfinity subscriber to access the internet via your device. They have 18 million such hotspots throughout the US. Give the expected usage of a few MB per year this would seem to be an easy ask and easily sold the end user as a feature not a cost.
Likewise nearly every major business that serves customers food refreshments or produces to buy on site provides wifi that requires only that you push a simple response to open it up. This can be and in fact is already automated on your phone for example.
Instead of referring to open wifi I would redirect the discussion to negotiable connections and they are everywhere.
And by "residential areas," I assume you mean "the very specific residential area where I live in my neighborhood, in my city, in my county, in my state, in my nation" since there is simply no way for you to have made a detailed assessment of the availability of open wifi for the entirety of the rest of the planet, or even for the small subset of its people who are on HN.
But thanks for informing me, and the 300 other people who reside in my building that we don't live in a residential area.
I'm sure there's something in the water that's driving my neighbours towards protected-by-default wifi, and not the defaults with which their ISP-provided routers are shipped with.
Yes! There's less focus on crypto part of it, and more emphasis on connecting people and communities as a WISP, but underneath it all, Althea is doing just that.
I've been to two medical facilities and a large regional hospital in the last week where there were open wifi networks with no portals. My apartment building operates an open wifi network for guests so we don't have to bother giving out passwords to visitors. An airport I visited last month has wide open wifi. A see ads on transit buses all the time stating that the bus has wifi. I suspect that is wide open because the transit agency didn't want to deal with tech support.
Open wifi is far from a thing of the past.